Cross-Modality Mutual Learning for Enhancing Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection on Bytecode

Over the past couple of years, smart contracts have been plagued by multifarious vulnerabilities, which have led to catastrophic financial losses. Their security issues, therefore, have drawn intense attention. As countermeasures, a family of tools has been developed to identify vulnerabilities in smart contracts at the source-code level. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of smart contracts is currently open-sourced. Another spectrum of work is presented to deal with pure bytecode, but most such efforts still suffer from relatively low performance due to the inherent difficulty in restoring abundant semantics in the source code from the bytecode. This paper proposes a novel cross-modality mutual learning framework for enhancing smart contract vulnerability detection on bytecode. Specifically, we engage in two networks, a student network as the primary network and a teacher network as the auxiliary network. takes two modalities, i.e., source code and its corresponding bytecode as inputs, while is fed with only bytecode. By learning from , is trained to infer the missed source code embeddings and combine both modalities to approach precise vulnerability detection. To further facilitate mutual learning between and , we present a cross-modality mutual learning loss and two transfer losses. As a side contribution, we construct and release a labeled smart contract dataset that concerns four types of common vulnerabilities. Experimental results show that our method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches.